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24 hrs at SEOmoz tells me the past 4 years have been a waste :-(

Call me naive, but all these years of article marketing, title tag and keyword density optimization, link wheels with blogger blogs and squidoo lenses, paid backlinks from blog networks, high PR blog commenting, etc -- I thought all that stuff was the recipe for stellar SEO, or at least that's what all the training and courses I've paid for have taught me.

After 4/25, my SERP ranks for about 20 keywords have gone from above-the-fold on page 1 of google to pages 5, 10, and beyond. "site:mydomain.com" still indicates I have 40k pages indexed in google, but the rankings have fallen so far from page 1 that I don't get the traffic volume I used to.

Strangely, my biggest competitor whom I've been monitoring for several years as they black-hat spammed their product and brand names in places such as abandoned forum profile signatures and auto-approve blogs (with literally thousands of other spam comment links), their ranks have gone up. Where they used to sit at the bottom of page 1 or top of page 2, they're now above-the-fold on page 1.

I'm completely new to SEOmoz and just today alone I have read and watched a combined 14 hours of blog posts, Q&As, and WBF videos. It's a wealth of knowledge and I'm kinda having an information-overload.

Does anyone have some worthwhile advice for a not-so-new newb on the next steps to take? Obviously no more article marketing, and I've canceled my subscription to link-juice and pragmites so no more paid backlinks. What I need is a "plan". I'm just not sure how to go about one.

6 Responses

Content is king, and don't worry... I worked for one of the largest affiliate marketing firms and that is all they knew...black hat SEO. Luckily, there is a whole other side.
Make your site useful, brandable and concentrate on only Facebook. Twitter and g+ for social backlinks.

What good is buying 50,000 followers if they are all non active, un interested, dormat accounts?

If I bought 50k followers and they turned out to be a load of sex accounts with spam attached, is that going to help me? No its not.

Patience is key, build a following naturally, over a period of 6-12 months and access it monthly how you go.

I have gone from 40 to 1,350 followers in 7 months. All naturally through interacting with my audience, gaining retweets, posting interesting content etc... And I would sya it grows weekly by about 20-40 followers a week now simply by talking to people, replying to people, posting good content people which to share.

Take your time, use SEOMoz to build you knowledge then slowly but surely improve your skills and refine what you know and thought you knew.

Trust me, I started off basic 7 months ago and since then I have found what I thought was right to be wrong, what I thought was right to be right and learn a whole host of new stuff. Its starting to come together, but its never going to end.

Ouch! Seriously! What I would suggest you to read SEOmoz blog daily… (Make it a habit) and you will feel the change in you… as far as what to do next with building links… try to focus on really quality so that you can surpass the quantity lf links that your competitors have…

- Content Marketing by writing guest post on very high quality blogs

- Write researches for News papers and get link from them

- Interview influencers in your niche

- Get Socially active

- Try Infographics and other link bait tactics

- Try Badges

- QnAs in your niche

Ideas are countless but you have to plan and execute it one by one properly… and if you manage to do all these properly you are soon hitting the page 1 of Google again!

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